UK Publishing Crowd Gathers in London to Discuss Self-Publishing | Publishing Perspectives

Floating somewhere between both was ghostwriter Andrew Crofts who has written for publishers large and very small. He took things right back to basics with a neat summary of the whole history of storytelling and the book industry. "We went from storytelling around the fire where the audience were the most important people, to a situation where storytellers forgot about audiences, forgot about readers and began to concentrate on pleasing publishers..."

This is where the rot set in, he believes (although he was overstating it, one feels, giving "good panel," as it were), and eventually created the conditions for self-publishing to emerge, once the tools were there.

What self-publishing has done is to relight the campfire. The glow of the tablet, mobile or laptop screen may have replaced the flames, but the direct engagement with the reader that the storyteller had in the cave has come back in ways that no one would have imagined, thanks to social media. The warmth of these digital flames can now be felt around the world - we're all in the cave again, only now it's both enormous and intimate.